Gingerbread dough: recipe. Gingerbread house dough recipe

• real choux pastry is prepared with honey;
• baking powder is not added to the dough. Instead, use 4 tablespoons of cognac or vodka per 1 kg of flour;
• You cannot replace butter with vegetable oil or margarine;
• to get the perfect gingerbread dough, you need to use low-grade flour;
• always add “dry perfume” for gingerbread to the dough (1.5-2 teaspoons per 1 kg of flour). All ingredients are listed below. Just combine them in a coffee grinder and grind them into powder;
• the finished gingerbread dough sticks a little to your hands and slowly slides off your palm if you lift it and hold it for 1.5-2 minutes;
• very stiff dough will not rise during baking, and very thin dough will not hold the cut-out shape of gingerbread cookies and will flow during baking;
• The dough turns out to be light in color when using light varieties of honey. If you need a dark-colored dough, feel free to tint it with cocoa powder;
• To keep the gingerbreads long after cooking, place a few pieces of fresh apple nearby.

Ingredients:

For the gingerbread dough:

• 450 grams of granulated sugar;
• 150 grams of 1st grade wheat flour (for brewing);
• 150 grams of peeled rye flour;
• 500/600 grams of 1st grade wheat flour;
• 450 grams of liquid natural honey;
• 160 grams of butter 72.5%-82%;
• 1 teaspoon;
• 3 medium-sized chicken eggs;
• 30 grams cocoa powder (optional)
• 250 ml., water.

Dry perfumes for gingerbread:

• 1/3 teaspoon dry ginger;
• 2 pieces of cloves;
• 1/3 teaspoon of star anise seeds;
• 4 pieces of allspice (peas);
• 1 teaspoon coriander seeds;
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon;
• 1/3 teaspoon ground nutmeg;
• 1/2 teaspoon cardamom seeds.

How to prepare choux pastry for gingerbread correctly

Let's start by preparing the ingredients. It is better to work with a wooden spoon or a spatula with a long handle.

Let's boil some water so we have it on hand.

Pour half a portion of sugar into a ladle/pan, preferably with a thick bottom, put it on fire (not too strong) and wait until it starts to melt. You can stir occasionally with a spoon. All the sugar has melted and turned into caramel, keep it on the fire until the color darkens, the so-called burnt sugar effect. It takes me about 3 minutes.

Now, we need to turn down the temperature of the caramel, which is twice the temperature of boiling water. We begin to pour in all the boiling water one tablespoon at a time. There is a dangerous point here: you cannot lean over the pan at this moment, as a large amount of steam is released. That's why it's better to use a long-handled spoon. The photo shows how much steam was released after adding 1 tablespoon of boiling water.

After the procedure with water, pour the second half of the sugar into the pan. We wait for it to dissolve and add honey and mix. Then add pieces of butter. Remove from heat and stir the batter thoroughly until all ingredients are combined. It's time to add dry gingerbread perfume to the dough.

Sift the flour for brewing (150 g) directly into the saucepan with the batter and brew it there.

Then, add soda and observe how the interaction between honey and soda occurs. Small bubbles will begin to appear on the surface, which are clearly visible in the photo. Leave the dough until it reaches a warm state.

In one bowl, mix the eggs with a fork. You cannot beat them with a mixer or blender (!). We need a homogeneous egg mixture and that's it. We add it to the dough and mix it with a spoon.

Add cocoa to a couple of tablespoons of flour and sift together. We add it to the dough, thereby we tint it. This is not required; it is optional.

Sift the rest of the flour (wheat and rye) together, add in parts and knead the dough.

When the dough becomes difficult to mix with a spoon, place it on a work surface with flour. We continue to knead the choux pastry for gingerbread without passing it through our fingers (!), using only the folding method. Knead the floured dough into a layer, sprinkle flour on top and fold it four times. Repeat this procedure until the dough begins to move away from your hands almost easily. Properly prepared gingerbread dough should stick slightly to your palm. And if you take it and put it on your palm, it will slowly creep down. The photo on the palm was taken almost 2 minutes after I took half the dough in my hands. This state of the dough indicates that it is properly prepared.

I divided the dough into two parts (you don't have to do this) and wrapped it tightly in cling film. Place the dough in the refrigerator overnight. It must spend at least 12 hours there. After this, the gingerbread choux pastry can be used. I got it so beautiful and smooth.

Another little tip: to make the gingerbread choux pastry easy to roll out, place it on a silicone mat, knead it with your hands, cover it with film and roll it out with a rolling pin. Then remove the film and roll the rolling pin over the surface of the dough to remove the relief of the film, but do not press on the dough. Good luck with your cooking!

This gingerbread dough and products based on it have many advantages. First of all, in terms of the cost of products, it turns out to be cheaper than what is prepared from natural honey. In addition, honey is a known allergen, which is especially important for today’s generation of children. Well, we won’t heat the honey, since we simply don’t use it (as is known, overheated honey in large quantities is harmful).

Another good thing about this gingerbread dough recipe is that you can store it in the refrigerator for even a year. We made a larger portion, wrapped it in a bag or film, and then, as needed, cut off a piece and baked gingerbread. And the gingerbread cookies made from this dough turn out to be very tasty: they are not dry at all, incredibly aromatic, very appetizing and can also be stored ready-made for more than a year.

In the recipe for gingerbread dough, I suggest using 2 types of flour - wheat and rye. If you don’t have rye, cook it exclusively with wheat flour (any type). From the specified amount of ingredients you get a decent amount of ready-to-use dough - you will definitely get 30 medium-sized gingerbread cookies!

Ingredients:

(250 grams) (125 milliliters) (350 grams) (150 grams) (1 piece ) (2 pieces ) (100 grams) (0.5 teaspoon) (1 teaspoon) (1 teaspoon) (0.5 teaspoon) (1 pinch) (1 pinch)

Cooking step by step:

The gingerbread dough recipe includes the following ingredients: wheat flour and rye flour, water, granulated sugar, butter, one chicken egg and two egg yolks, half a teaspoon of baking soda and a pinch of salt. I use cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and nutmeg as spices for gingerbread dough. All these additives are already in dry and ground form.

Let's start preparing gingerbread dough by making burnt sugar or burnt sugar. To do this, pour half of the granulated sugar (125 grams) into a thick-walled saucepan or deep frying pan (small diameter).

Place the bowl with sugar on the stove and begin to melt over a slightly lower than medium heat. First, a caramel of a pleasant golden hue forms at the bottom. You can use a spatula to help the sugar melt faster.

Then almost all of the sugar will disperse and turn into a beautiful mass of rich caramel color. But this is only an intermediate stage - we need burnt sugar.

Now is one of the most difficult moments - you need to catch the exact moment when smoke appears above the surface of the caramel and the mass becomes dark. But here it is important not to overcook the caramel, otherwise it will simply turn black and burn - you will have to start all over from the very beginning.

As soon as the mass has darkened, we begin to pour 125 milliliters of boiling water into it in parts (keep it ready, since it can burn at any moment). I tried very, very hard to capture the process of combining water and burnt sugar, but I think you understand that this is unrealistic. Stir the caramel with one hand, pour boiling water with the other, and take pictures at this moment... Moreover, at this moment the contents of the saucepan are more than active - bubbling and foaming to the very edge of the dish.

In just 10 seconds everything will calm down and our burnt sugar will completely dissolve in the water. Let's move on to the next stage.

Now it’s time to add 100 grams of butter to our burnt sugar base. Cold or soft is not so important, because it will completely disintegrate anyway.

Let it sit on the table and cool a little. The temperature of the contents of the dish needs to drop to 60-70 degrees, but I don’t have a thermometer. so I just wait 3-4 minutes.

Now we will brew wheat flour. We sift 130 grams of wheat flour in advance and add it to the aromatic sugar-butter base, which is still quite hot.

Mix everything with a spoon or fork so that there are no lumps left. You can use a whisk or mixer - it’s even faster and more convenient.

Let the custard base for the gingerbread dough cool again - this time to room temperature. I just took the saucepan out to the balcony, where everything cooled down in literally 10 minutes. Now it's time to introduce the eggs. Shake one whole chicken egg and 2 egg yolks a little with a fork and pour into a saucepan for the future gingerbread dough. Mix everything until it becomes homogeneous and smooth. Place the two whites you have left in the refrigerator for now, and then use them to make icing sugar to decorate the finished gingerbread cookies.

To knead raw gingerbread dough, sugar syrup is first prepared by boiling sugar, honey and molasses with water. The syrup is cooled to 20-22°C, the density of the syrup should be 1.31-1.32 g/cm3. The dough can be prepared without first dissolving the sugar, but in this case the kneading will be longer. Gingerbread dough is kneaded in kneading machines with a stationary vat. The raw materials are loaded into the kneading vat in the following order: sugar or sugar syrup, water, honey, molasses, melange, dry perfume. All ingredients are mixed for 3-4 minutes, then flour and chemical leavening agents are added and kneading continues for another 10-15 minutes. The humidity of the raw dough is 24-26%, the temperature is 20-22oC. Elevated temperatures and prolonged cutting of raw dough can cause it to tighten due to significant swelling of the gluten. Gingerbread cookies made from overdone dough or from dough with insufficient moisture are compressed and have low porosity; When the humidity of the dough is high, the products become blurry. To prevent overcooking, the raw dough is prepared in small portions, which are cut in 15-20 minutes.

During storage, raw gingerbreads become stale very quickly. By using invert syrup instead of sugar or preparing the dough with warm syrup at a temperature of 38-40°C, you can improve the quality of raw gingerbread cookies and somewhat delay their staleness. The duration of cutting a portion of dough mixed with warm syrup is reduced to 7-8 minutes, otherwise it will take longer. You can also prepare raw gingerbread according to the recipe for custard varieties. The dough for Vyazma and Tula gingerbreads is kneaded with sugar syrup, cooled to 30-35oC. Kneading the dough for Tula gingerbread lasts 30-40 minutes, and for Vyazma gingerbread - 7-8 minutes. The final dough temperature for Vyazma and Tula gingerbread is 27-28 ° C, the dough humidity is 18-20%.

Chouxed gingerbread dough is prepared in 3 stages: syrup - brewing - dough. To obtain syrup, a mixture of honey, sugar, molasses and margarine is heated with water to 80-100°C. The density of the syrup is 1.31-1.32 g/cm3. By mixing flour with hot syrup in a machine, you get tea leaves. In most cases, the temperature of the syrup before mixing it with flour is in the range of 65-75°C, and the brewing temperature is 48-55°C. When using hotter syrup, the flour starch swells more fully, which improves the quality of the gingerbread. However, when using hot syrup, the cooling of the brew slows down, the temperature of which should be 29-30°C before mixing with other raw materials.

Previously, gingerbread brew was kept in a cold room from four weeks to one year, it was believed that with prolonged storage the quality of the product improved. Such resting complicated the preparation of gingerbread and interfered with the organization of continuous production. Research in recent years has shown that resting does not significantly affect the quality of products; the composition of the tea leaves practically does not change during long-term resting.

Currently, in a number of enterprises, the tea leaves are cooled in chests or baking trays, where the dough is placed in layers and greased with vegetable oil or sprinkled with crumbs so that a monolithic mass does not form. Cooling duration is from 1 to 6 days. However, it is more rational from the point of view of organizing production to cool the tea leaves by using a kneading machine with a water jacket to knead it. To speed up the preparation of choux pastry, syrup at a temperature of 50-55 ° C is sometimes used, the brewing temperature in this case is 38-40 ° C, it cools relatively quickly, after which it is mixed with the rest of the raw materials (flavors and chemical leavening agents).

Kneading choux pastry cooled in a kneading machine lasts 25-30 minutes, and with colder syrup - only 5-8 minutes, dough temperature 29-30 ° C, humidity - 20-22%.

Gingerbread cookies were prepared for all holidays and were made in different shapes and sizes. They owe their name to the spices that have been part of the recipe since ancient times. Gingerbread, which originally included honey and molasses, has today undergone some changes. The fact is that sugar has become much more accessible than honey, and products began to be made using it. Below we will look at different test options.

Gingerbread dough: a recipe from time immemorial

As mentioned above, gingerbread is one of the most ancient sweets in Rus'. According to some sources, they were baked back in the 10th century. When modern housewives prepare gingerbread dough, the recipe, of course, differs from that of old Russian sweets. However, three can be distinguished - honey, sugar and sugar-honey. It contains both sugar and honey. You can prepare the dough in two different ways. With the simplified version, the products become stale faster. The second option takes more time, but the gingerbread cookies stay fresh and soft longer. Below we will look at both methods.

Choux pastry

This is the most difficult option that a housewife who decides to make gingerbread dough can use. This recipe is easy to master and will delight you with seven delicious gingerbread cookies in the future.

• So, you need to take 750 g of flour, 1 glass of sugar, 60 g of honey, 100 g of butter, 1 egg, 0.5 teaspoon of soda, 0.5 tsp. spices to taste, 60 ml water. If all proportions are observed, you will get approximately 1 kg of dough.

As you can see, the gingerbread dough recipe is not as complicated as it might seem at first glance. So, in order to make it, put honey, sugar, water in a saucepan and heat it without bringing it to a boil. Then it is recommended to add half the flour and spices to the mixture. It is best to stir the product for the product with a wooden spatula. Moreover, if you leave the flour in the syrup without stirring for at least a couple of minutes, then lumps will appear in the dough, which will be difficult to get rid of. Cool the resulting mixture to room temperature, and then add the rest of the flour, eggs and baking powder. The finished dough should be soft. To make a tasty dish, you need to start cutting the dough right away, otherwise the finished gingerbread cookies will be of poor quality. This gingerbread dough recipe is closest to the original old version.

Simple test option

For housewives who do not want to spend a lot of time preparing dough, the following recipe is suitable. You need to put honey in a saucepan, add butter, mashed with sugar, spices and knead all the ingredients for a couple of minutes. Then add flour (preferably sifted) and soda and knead the dough. If crystals have formed in the honey, then it must be heated, but under no circumstances should it be brought to a boil. This will cause it to lose its aroma, which means the product will not be as tasty. Honey for gingerbread cookies should be at room temperature. What consistency the gingerbread dough should be - the recipe with photo will demonstrate only approximately. You need to be able to determine this by touch.

Making a Christmas treat

The dough recipe for a gingerbread house differs from the usual one in that here it should be more fragrant and festive. There are many options, and every housewife can choose exactly the one she likes. For example, excellent gingerbread dough (recipe from Gerda) is obtained if all proportions are strictly observed.

• So, we will need: 0.5 kg of honey, 0.3 kg of butter and 0.3 kg of cane sugar, 50-100 g of cocoa (depending on whether you want to make the house chocolate or not). You will also need 3 tablespoons of rum, a little baking powder, a pinch or two of cinnamon, a pinch of ground cardamom, a little ground cloves, a pinch and a little fresh grated root. For spices, it is also recommended to add a pinch of ground anise seeds, a little star anise (ground), ground nutmeg, vanilla, the zest of one orange and lemon. This proportion will require a little more than 1 kg of flour.

Of course, every housewife makes a unique gingerbread dough. Skripkin’s recipe, for example, can be slightly modernized by removing such a large number of spices. The dough recipe with modifications is given below.

• We will need: 500 grams of honey, 300 grams of sugar, 300 grams of butter, 50 grams of cocoa, zest of one lemon, zest of an orange, vanilla to taste.

Thus, it is clear that gingerbread dough (recipe) and products made from it do not require high culinary skills and can be done even by a novice housewife.

Making gingerbread dough: recipe for cookies

Many people know gingerbread men only as characters from the cartoon "Shrek". Meanwhile, these are traditional cookies for Catholic Christmas, which can be used to please children on any other day.

So, how to make this gingerbread dough? See the recipe below.

We will need:

• 3 eggs.
• 1.5 cups molasses.
• 6 cups sifted flour.
• Approximately 300 g margarine.
• 250 g sugar.
• 2 tablespoons of cocoa or instant coffee.
• 4 spoons of soda, quenched in vinegar.
• A little ground ginger.
• A pinch of ground cinnamon.
• A pinch of clove powder.

How to make the cookies themselves?

For cookies, we first need a template and, of course, gingerbread dough. The recipe was given above, but we will duplicate it again. Thanks to the template, the little people will turn out identical and beautiful. Gingerbread dough and products made from it are distinguished by the fact that they hold their shape perfectly, and any figures can be made from them. The dough preparation process itself is simple. You need to mix oil, spices, soda and salt in a saucepan, and then add sugar and honey.

You can mash everything with a spoon, or you can beat it with a mixer. Dissolve cocoa in a couple of tablespoons of boiling water, let cool to room temperature and add to the dough at the same time as the eggs. After this, add 3.5 cups of flour, continuing to beat the mass with a mixer. Add the remaining flour and knead the dough with your hands. It should not be too dense so that it rolls out easily. Place the finished product in the refrigerator for at least 5-6 hours, after wrapping it in cling film. After this, take out the dough and place it on a board, rolling it out into a thin layer. To prevent it from sticking, sprinkle flour on the rolling pin. However, you need to handle flour more carefully so as not to spoil the taste of the cookies. Cut out little people from the rolled out dough and bake until done. Afterwards, you can separately make glaze and decorate the finished cookies.

Variations in the recipe

Some components can be replaced. For example, take vegetable oil instead of butter, and add baking powder instead of soda. But ginger must be present in any case. It is this that gives cookies a unique taste that is loved by both adults and children all over the world. If you don’t have molds, you can make a template yourself from thick paper or cardboard.

Not every housewife has one in her kitchen. But don’t be upset, as it can be replaced with a so-called pastry bag. To do this, simply cut off a corner of a plastic bag, and the glaze is already squeezed out of it.

Colored glaze is made by adding food coloring to it. If the cookies are large, then multi-colored buttons can be laid out from candies.

Gingerbread house No. 2: ideas for inspiration

Gingerbread dough and products made from it are an excellent gift option for family and friends for any occasion. Below we will look at the technology for making a gingerbread house. The dough recipe for a gingerbread house is not very different from a simple gingerbread recipe.

Heat honey, margarine and sugar. Whisk, adding cocoa, until all lumps disappear. The mass should be homogeneous and should not boil.

Mix flour with spices and baking powder. If desired, you can add orange zest.

Add eggs and rum or cognac into the heated honey mixture in two steps.

Add flour and spices to the honey mixture and knead the dough thoroughly. It shouldn't leak. On average it takes 15-20 minutes to knead. However, do not try to mix in all the flour at once. The dough will gradually cool down. It must be placed in the refrigerator, first wrapped in cling film. Let the dough rest for at least 5 hours.

"Construction" of a sweet house

Make a template of the parts of the house - walls, roof and other figures that you see fit. Roll out the dough and cut out the details of the house. Bake for 20-25 minutes until done.

The foundation of the future house should be gingerbread. It is to this that the walls are attached.

The windows are made from marmalade or caramel. True, in conditions of high humidity it will most likely melt. Therefore, it is best to take candies without filling or marmalade slices.

Transparent caramel should not be used. It does not melt well, and even if it does melt, it still flows out of the “windows” of the house, ruining the entire product. If there is high humidity in the house, it is not recommended to cook caramel yourself - it will still melt and leak out. This means that the work will go down the drain. But in any case, the most important thing is well-prepared gingerbread dough. The recipe (Pokhlebkin suggests slightly different proportions) assumes a dense and non-sticky dough. We must constantly remember this.

For the house you need to make glaze or icing. To do this, powdered sugar with proteins, lemon juice and starch is ground so that there are no bubbles. The finished mass is placed in or in a milk bag with a corner cut off. You can also use a regular paper file; it is quite dense and easy to work with.

Gingerbread cookies with sugar

We looked at several ways to make gingerbread dough. The recipe without honey is very popular nowadays, since honey is a rather expensive product. Below we will look at an old recipe for gingerbread without honey. They turn out somewhat unusual, but also very tasty. So, for the test we need:

• 300 g of sifted flour (in principle, the recipe may indicate more, but then the dough will turn out very tough).
• 40 g butter.
• 50 g sugar.
• Cinnamon and cardamom to taste.
• 50 g raisins.
• 1 egg.

Mix sugar, cinnamon and cardamom.

Then mix sugar with spices, flour and egg with butter. The dough should be quite dense, but not stiff, otherwise the product will be harsh and quickly become stale.

Place small dough balls on a greased baking sheet. Alternatively, you can roll out the dough into small flat cakes and make shaped edges.

Bake for 15-20 minutes. However, if you are making balls, they will need to sit in the oven a little longer to bake completely.

If desired, cover the finished products with icing, sugar pearls and chocolate. If you strictly follow the recipe, they will turn out almost unsweetened. Therefore, chocolate and icing are a must. You can change the amount of sugar, proportionally increasing the amount of other components.

Gingerbread cookies have been very popular in our country since ancient times. They were prepared in different varieties, types and sizes, starting with small ones, weighing a few grams, and ending with huge gingerbreads and gingerbreads weighing up to 1-1.5 kg. The dough products were stamped using special gingerbread boards (“printed gingerbreads”). One of the features of gingerbread dough is that it usually contains a lot of spices, which give it a special aroma. Perhaps the very name “gingerbread” comes from the word “spice”. A mixture of spices that are added to gingerbread dough creates a flavor “bouquet”. Here, for example, is the composition of one of these bouquets, g: cinnamon - 40, cloves - 12, allspice - 12, black pepper - 4, star anise - 8, nutmeg - 12, cardamom - 4, ginger - 8.

Gingerbread dough is characterized by a high content of sugar, honey and molasses, but it is low in fat. Flour for the dough should be low in gluten (26-28%). Chemical leavening agents leaven the dough, since the high sugar content and low humidity prevent the development of yeast.
The dough is prepared in two ways: raw and choux. In the latter case, part of the flour is boiled before kneading the dough.

The peculiarities of the recipe and preparation of gingerbreads mean that many types of them can be preserved for a long time without becoming stale. Staling of flour products is a complex process associated with the aging of starch jellies. During baking, the starch gelatinizes, binding some of the water and turning into jelly. During storage in jelly, starch particles rearrange, it becomes denser, its ability to bind water decreases, and the jelly, as they say, “gets old.” This process causes staling of flour products. It is expressed in the fact that the surface crust loses its fragility and becomes elastic, and the pulp acquires the ability to crumble and becomes very compact after drying.
Gingerbread dough contains honey and molasses, which slow down the staling process. In addition, brewing flour and invert syrup also work.

If necessary, molasses can be replaced with invert syrup, sugar or glucose: instead of 1000 g of molasses, use 1100 g of invert syrup or 750 g of sugar.
Invert syrup is prepared from sugar, adding a small amount of water and citric acid. When this mixture is boiled, beet sugar breaks down into simpler sugars - glucose and fructose. The mixture of these sugars is called invert syrup. Invert syrup is added to fudge to prevent it from becoming sugary and to dough to reduce staling.

Gingerbread dough

Ingredients:

• flour - 1000 g,
• sugar - 300 g,
• water - 200 g,
• molasses, or invert syrup - 100 g,
• honey - 100 g,
• eggs - 3 pcs,
• butter or margarine - 100 g,
• soda - 4 g,
• dry spices - 5 g,
• sugar for palenka - 50 g.

Preparation of dough using the raw method.

Honey, molasses and palenka are mixed, heated to 40-50 ° C and filtered through a sieve. Then pour in cold water, add eggs and sugar. Granulated sugar with large crystals may not dissolve during the process of kneading dough and baking, as a result of which the quality of the finished products deteriorates. Therefore, such sugar should be preheated together with water, stirring until it is completely dissolved, then cooled to 20-30 ° C and knead the mixture for 2-3 minutes. After this, add finely ground spices, soda, softened butter or margarine, and flour to the dough and knead for 10-15 minutes. If invert syrup is added to the dough, then the soda is mixed with flour and the dough is kneaded for no more than 3-5 minutes.
The kneaded dough should have a temperature no higher than 22 ° C, because at high temperatures it sticks to the table, rocking chair and recesses, and at low temperatures it is difficult to move in layers.

The humidity of the raw dough should be in the range of 24-26%. If it is higher, the dough is poorly formed, the products are vague, with compacted pores, sometimes they stick to the baking sheet during baking, and cavities form on the bottoms of the products. If the dough is insufficiently moist, small-volume products are formed.

Flour for small portions of dough is sifted onto the table, leaving 6-8% of it for sprinkling. After mixing it with rippers, the flour is shaped into a mound with a depression in the middle, into which the prepared liquid is filtered, after which softened butter is added. Use your hands to rake the flour towards the center and mix it with the liquid. When some of the flour (approximately 50%) has combined with the liquid, quickly knead all the flour until the dough has a uniform consistency.

For large portions, the dough is kneaded in a bowl or other vessel. Add all the products except flour to the strained syrup, stirring, then add flour and knead the dough with both hands until half cooked, i.e. until it becomes difficult to knead. After this, with both hands, pinch off a piece of half-kneaded dough weighing 1.5-2 kg and knead it on the table so that it is homogeneous. A piece of kneaded dough is left on a table sprinkled with flour. Then knead another piece of dough in the same way, place it on top of the first piece and knead and lay the entire dough.

Preparing the dough using the choux method.

The process of preparing such a dough consists of three phases: preparing the tea leaves, cooling it and kneading the dough. Depending on the type of gingerbread, the flour is brewed with sugar-honey or sugar-treacle syrup.

Prepare and cool the tea leaves like this. Sugar, honey, molasses are loaded into the pan, water is poured in and, stirring, the mixture is heated to a temperature of 70-75 ° C, i.e. until a clear syrup forms. It is filtered through a sieve into another bowl and cooled to a temperature of at least 55 ° C, sifted flour is added, leaving a little for sprinkling, and the tea leaves are kneaded. You need to mix flour with hot syrup quickly, because if unmixed flour comes into contact with hot syrup for a long time, lumps will form, which are then difficult to stir. The humidity of the brewing mixture should be 19-20%.
If the recipe calls for a lot of eggs and butter, then brew part of the flour, and use the rest in the process of kneading the dough, leaving 6-8% for sprinkling.

Raising agents and aromatic substances cannot be added to hot brewing, as they lose their properties, and therefore the brewing is kept for at least a day and only then additives are added. Knead the choux pastry like this. Place the cooled tea leaves into the vessel, add the remaining prepared products specified in the recipe and knead the dough for 30 minutes.
When preparing small portions of dough up to 3-5 kg, a depression is made in the tea leaves placed on the table, where softened butter, eggs, spices, baking powder and flour left for kneading are placed, after which everything is mixed until a homogeneous dough is obtained.

If a large amount of dough is being prepared, the tea leaves are divided into 10 identical pieces, one piece is mixed with the products specified in the recipe, divided evenly into nine parts, and added to the remaining nine pieces of tea leaves. After this, each piece of dough in turn is mixed well and placed on the table on top of each other, having first sprinkled the table with flour. The resulting large piece of dough is cut from top to bottom into pieces and again each piece is mixed well to have a dough of uniform consistency.

Rocking and baking. Before rolling, a small piece of the dough is torn off and baked to determine the quality of the dough. After this, they begin to form the products. To do this, on a table lightly sprinkled with flour, knead a small piece of dough and shape it into a rectangle. Then, having well floured the table and a piece of dough, roll it out with a rolling pin evenly in all directions, starting from the inside. As soon as the dough begins to stick to the table and rocker, sprinkle it with flour and roll it onto the rolling pin. If at the same time the dough is difficult to lag behind the table, it is trimmed with a knife. Sprinkle the table with flour again and, having unrolled the dough sheet, continue to roll it to the desired thickness. To determine the thickness of the layer, it is cut in several places with a knife and, by lifting the cut part, the thickness of the layer in a given place is determined.
Products of various shapes are cut out from the prepared layer of dough using a knife or a notch. To prevent the dough from sticking, sprinkle it with flour, and when laying it on a baking sheet, sweep the flour from the products with a brush.

Gingerbreads with a hard dough are placed on dry leaves, and with a weak dough - on sheets sprinkled with flour or greased with oil. Gingerbread cookies that stick to the sheet will form cavities, and their bottoms will be torn.

The layers of dough that are coated with egg should dry out before shaping to make it easier to shape the products. It is better to coat the products after formation. In this case, they are placed on sheets moistened with warm water, or warm water mixed with fat. The products stick slightly to the sheet and do not move during coating.

Gingerbread cookies are baked at a temperature of 200-240 °C for 10-15 minutes immediately after formation, and gingerbread cookies are baked at 190-210 °C for 30-40 minutes. At high temperatures, products bake faster, but their surface may char and the lower layers may turn into a dense crust.

Gingerbread cookies coated with egg are baked in the oven without moistening, and gingerbreads not covered with egg are baked with moistening, which adds shine to the surface. After baking, the gingerbreads coated with egg are wiped several times with a soft brush to make them shine better.